My mother worked crossword puzzles for as long as she could, and I’d buy increasingly larger sizes and simpler books of them, until Alzheimer’s finally took away her ability, and therefore her interest, in doing them. When she died, I still had a few of those books, and I’d work puzzles in them occasionally, but I never really shared her enthusiasm. I more often like finding words in big blocks of letters (also why I enjoy playing the game of Boggle), and I really like Scrabble (as did she), which is why I still play the online version of that with several friends.
I think all kinds of games and puzzles, whether with words or numbers (numbers will never be my go-to), help keep us sharp as we age. (Not to mention the way cut-throat card games can keep us social and hopefully having shit-talking fun.)
I think I’ve mentioned before on here that I do a game that’s emailed to me each morning in the newsfeed I subscribe to. It’s a word game that I use to test my mental acuity, and I don’t actually play by the rules of the game (which would make it similar to Boggle, with more rules), I just try to find the solution that suits my own criteria. I started doing this in 2020, and I’m still going strong. It’s a rare day when I don’t find the one word I’m looking for, though it has happened.
In August, my newsfeed started including a new daily game called Connections, which I think can probably be found on other online sites. I LOVE it, and again, it’s a good way to make me think and reassure me that I still can. You’re given a list of 16 words, and you have to divide them in related groups of four. Since words could often be included in more than one group, it can take some thinking. Here are three examples below if you want to grab a pencil and piece of paper and see how you categorize the words, and I’ll put the solutions behind a cut.
Below shows the order in which I picked my groups. The first group of four was easy, and it’s a good thing the next two groups seemed clear, because I’d never have gotten the name of the fourth group category. Sometimes that fourth group only comes together because I’ve eliminated everything else. In a couple of other games I haven’t shown here, the categories of names of items common on slot machines and names of animals in the Chinese zodiac gave me a lot of grief.
Took a leap of faith on this one, because there were several words that crossed into other categories, like SCOOTER, PIGGY, and CHEF. Fortunately, you get to make three mistakes, because I did on the Muppets. (Same thing happened to me in a game that included Peanuts characters.) Again, the fourth category name wasn’t that clear to me until those words were all I had left.
This was one of the most challenging. The first group was easy, though I didn’t guess the category name. But then it got a little murkier. SPLIT, for example, could have easily gone with the soda fountain orders (banana split), but also implied movement, as did HOVER and SHAKE.
From the words I was left with, I kept trying to finish certain words (like HOVERcraft and STARcraft), and I was stumped for a while until I realized the finishing word was BOARD (hover board, star board, key board, and dash board). Which left me with the last category of SIGNS, GLASS, OLD, and SPLIT. What?!?
D’oh! This is what I get for only having watched one M. Night Shyamalan movie and knowing the name of only one other, neither of which was in this group.
